|
|
||
|
|
|
|
Also see the website:
http://saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Erich_Trefftz_%281888-1937%29
An Appreciation of Erich Trefftz
By Erwin Stein
Erich Trefftz was born on February 21, 1888 in Leipzig, Germany. His father Oskar Trefftz was a merchant, and also his mother Eliza, née Runge descended from a merchant family. His grandmother was British, and thus he had early contacts with his British relatives with the side effect that he could speak English fluently. In 1890, the family moved to Aachen where he earned his matura in a humanistic gymnasium in 1906. In the same year he began his studies in the faculty of mechanical engineering of the Technical University of Aachen, but changed to mathematics after only half of a year. It is essential for the whole scientific career of Erich Trefftz that he had access to mathematics through a technical discipline. Later he became one of the eminent applied mathematicians and mechanicians of Germany, with major interest in theoretical and numerical problems of continuum mechanics. Remarkably, not many mathematicians worked in applied topics during the second half of the 19th century, different from 17th, 18th and the first half of 19th century, where famous mathematicians like Leibniz, Newton, the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy and Gauss were stimulated by physical problems for their mathematical discoverer. With Weierstrass, Dedikind and Cantor, the inner logical development of the structures of mathematics was progressed in Germany. But with the beginning of the 20th century a new drive towards applied and numerical mathematics began by Ritz and Galerkin and also by Carl Runge, the uncle of Erich Trefftz. Runge postulated that a mathematical problem can only be said to be solved totally if — at the end — results can be also produced in the form of numbers. This challenge always guided Erich Trefftz.
In 1908 Trefftz moved from Aachen to the University of Göttingen, at that time the Mecca of Mathematics and Physics. Here, after Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann now Hilbert, Klein, Runge and Prandtl created a continuous sequence of world–wide first class mathematical progress. Trefftz’ most significant teachers were Carl Runge, David Hilbert and also Ludwig Prandtl, the genious mechanician in modern fluid– and aerodynamics. Trefftz spent one year at Columbia University, New York, and then left Göttingen for Strassburg to study under the guidance of the famous Austrian applied mathematician Richard von Mises, who founded the GAMM (Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik) in 1922 together with Ludwik Prandtl in Göttingen. Richard von Mises was also the first editor of ZAMM (Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik). Trefftz had a life–long friendly relationship with von Mises who, being a Jew, had to leave Germany in 1933. Trefftz felt and showed outgoing helpful solidarity and friendship to von Mises, and he clearly was in expressed distance of the Hitler regime until he died at a young age in 1937. But feeling the responsibility for Science, he took over the presidency of GAMM, and he became the editor of ZAMM in 1933 with the full approval of Richard von Mises.
Trefftz’ academic career began with his doctoral thesis in Strassburg in 1913 in which he solved a mathematical problem of hydromechanics. He was a soldier in the first world war, but already in 1919 he earned his habilitation and became a full professor of mathematics in Aachen.
In 1918 Erich Trefftz married Friede Offermann. They had five children. The marriage was very happy, and it was of great importance in his life.
In the year 1922 he became a full professor with a chair in the faculty of mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Dresden. There he became responsible for teaching and research of strength of materials, theory of elasticity, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics and aircraft technique. In the following years he mainly published papers on aero– and hydrodynamics and then devoted his interests more to the theory of elasticity, stability theory and structural problems.
In 1927 he moved from the engineering to the mathematical and natural science faculty, being appointed there as a chairholder in Technical (Applied) Mechanics. Already in 1929 Erich Trefftz became an honourable doctor (Dr–Ing.) of the Technical University of Stuttgart. He was an excellent and inspired teacher, joining his deep theoretical and practical understanding of mechanics with mathematical rigour in a broad area of technical problems, but his special inclination always belonged to aerodynamics.
Erich Trefftz died nearly 49 years old on January 21, 1937 in Dresden in consequence of a malicious disease. An expressive bust in the Willers building of the Technical University of Dresden is a reminiscent to a great mechanician of this century.
Page 43 / 220